25 July 2008

The Antarctic Cryosphere Access Portal (A-CAP) Beta Version Released

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A beta version, or prototype, of the Antarctic Cryosphere Access Portal (A-CAP)
(http://nsidc.org/agdc/acap/) has
been released for public use. A-CAP is a geo-visualization and data download tool developed at the National Snow and Ice Data Center
(NSIDC) Antarctic Glaciological Data Center (AGDC). A-CAP provides AGDC data
and other Antarctic-wide parameters, including glaciology, ice core data, snow
accumulation, satellite imagery, digital elevation models (DEMs),
sea ice concentration, and many other cryosphere-related scientific measurements.

Figure 1. Example map images produced with A-CAP Beta.

A-CAP provides an interactive Web interface, allowing the user to zoom in to a specific region as well as overlay coastlines, placenames,
latitude/longitude, and other geographic information. In addition, customizable A-CAP map images
and source data are also accessible via the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Web Map Service (WMS),
Web Feature Service (WFS),
and Web Coverage Service (WCS).
For more details and instructions for accessing these OGC services, click
here. These international specifications provide an interoperable framework
for sharing maps and geospatial data over the Internet, enabling remote access
through OGC-compliant software applications such as ArcGIS, Google Earth, ENVI,
and many others.

Many more data sets will be added to the site as they are prepared, especially
including those in AGDC's
Data Catalog.

We welcome your feedback on this project. If you have questions, comments or
suggestions, please contact the
A-CAP Team. A-CAP is developed using MapServer,
an Open Source development environment for building spatially-enabled Internet
applications.